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 the first time I walked by The Pleasure Chest, a seedy sex shop on the north side of Chicago, and I was thirteen the second and third and fourth time, too. Like most girls in that first flush of adolescence, I was titillated by sex, but I was horrified by it, too. Sex was primal cries slipping under the door of my divorced mother's bedroom. It was Diane Keaton in Mr. Goodbar getting it night after night, and coming up damaged the next day. It seemed like all of that peril was embodied in the window display of The Pleasure Chest: the luscious red neon sign, the black drop-cloth blocking out whatever misdeeds were going on inside, the changing decorations one week, an owl mask and feathers; the next, a naked mannequin, crisscrossed by a harness.
Twenty years later, I've walked into my share of sex shops. But no matter the unorthodoxies of my sex life, I've never gotten over that adolescent nervousness: checking the street for coworkers, creeping like a ninja, mumbling questions to the clerk. So when I passed porn provocateur Larry Flynt's Hustler Hollywood a veritable sex superstore, with its picture windows and silver torsos winking in the sunlight, prominently positioned on L.A.'s Sunset Boulevard  I paused. Here was a sex shop that went out of its way to welcome the uninitiated, where dildos were sold like 501s, or hand-blown vases. There was even a café serving lattes. On the one hand, it seemed enlightened and democratic to lift the veil; on the other, you lose the mystique that makes sex alluring. Cementing my ambivalence was the neon message Flynt had placed on a huge silver globe revolving above the store: "For the Rest of the World."
Curious about what the rest of the world looks like, I took a job at Hustler Hollywood or to be more accurate, spent a day masquerading as an employee. I'd read Flynt's boilerplate: he wanted a chain where "a Beverly Hills housewife could feel at ease buying a vibrator." Less sleazy than The Pleasure Chest, but not as hip as feminist venues like Good Vibrations more like Pottery Barn, in other words. As I stepped through the glass front doors, I could see he'd mastered the mall aesthetic: the pine floor was buffed, the track lighting was soft, the air was climate controlled. Taking a quick glance around at the merchandise (I hoped to be able to at least blandly wave customers in the right direction if approached), I saw to my left a display of chunky gold candles carved to look like Greek friezes, to my right, velveteen picture frames embossed with "bad girl" and "bad boy." There was a sportswear section, with neatly stacked camisoles and T-shirts emblazoned with "hung" and "porn star" as well as fleeces and fishing hats, I guess for enthusiasts from the Great Lakes region. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some actual sex merchandise: just beyond the clothing section was the massage oil, the flavored body oil and the lubricants, row after row of them: the mother lode.
My first customer approached while I was familiarizing myself with the café's book selection. He was wearing topsiders and a pink oxford. "Do you carry the book Get Paid for Sex?" he asked.
I wandered over to the lingerie section. The sensibility was Frederick's of Hollywood: blazing pink vinyl bras, leather corsets, that kind of thing. "Oooooh, this is nice," a voluptuous woman said, fingering the sleeve of a red fur-trimmed negligee. "That's not sexy," her man said, clearly annoyed. "That's comedy." On the back wall was a modest selection of paddles and floggers that spent most of the day looking pretty lonely. The handcuffs, however, saw plenty of action. I decide to conduct an informal study of the bondage demographic. Among the takers: a Martha Stewart type in beige linen; a mid-thirties man in a Mall of America T-shirt and his school-marmish girlfriend, who kept whispering, "Hush!" and a Latina woman who seemed to be helping her daughter choose a gift for her boyfriend: "Look, honey, the 'Bonds of Love' kit comes with a blindfold!"
Unlike me, the Hustler Hollywood employees did not seem at all surprised by their mainstream customers. "Everybody buys porno. Everybody wants to fuck," said Doug, an ebullient twenty-four year old. Doug is from Texas. When I told him I went to school in Austin, he said, "Austin. People like dildos in Austin."  As the store's toy buyer, he's an inveterate sexual trend-spotter. "Anal sex is very in," he confided to me in an insider tone. "Everyone's doing it. You see a woman wheeling three kids around in her grocery cart, and you can bet that later, she's in here buying anal lube."
Doug gave me a primer in the store's most popular toys, which were kept in the Adults Only section, far away from the candles and scented pillows. (It struck me as absurd to have an Adults Only section in a sex shop, but Doug explained that it's some sort of legal issue.) Predictably, vibrators are the biggest sellers. Women especially like a big blue one called The Tidal Wave, and the eminently portable Pocket Rocket. "These are nice and quiet, so you can get off anywhere," Doug said, handing me the package. "In the office, in the car . . . " In the office? Female customers also like the Pearl Butterfly, which looks like a Barbie accessory. It was a bit girlish for my taste, but when Doug told me that the pearls inside spin around, I leaned in closer to examine it.
Next, he led me to the signature porn star dildos. "Say you have a fetish for a particular porn star, like Ty Fox," Doug began. "You're probably thinking, 'I wish Ty could fuck me.'" He picked up a box with a huge black cock inside and held it out to me. "Well, we sell his dick."
As Doug and I walked around discussing the various merits of anal plugs, it dawned on me that, for the first time ever, I was completely comfortable talking about and touching this stuff in public. Maybe it was the all-American superstore vibe; maybe it was the way Doug's brashness forced me out of my corner; maybe it was just that the more you talk about something, the more desensitized you become to it.
After Doug, I hooked up with twenty-one-year-old Matt, another clerk. He used to work in shipping and receiving at the Disney Store, until his manager moved him upstairs to work the floor, which meant wearing Mickey Mouse ears embroidered with his name. He quit. Now he was wearing the Hustler staff T-shirt, which said, "RELAX. IT'S JUST SEX." I felt like it was speaking directly to me.
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